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Richard Fox Pleads Guilty to the Murder of Crystal Curthoys in Niagara Falls

Already serving 40 years to life for killing two Buffalo women, Fox admitted a third murder: Curthoys, 32, whose remains were found walled in under a Niagara Falls basement stairway.

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Archive portrait of Richard Fox

Richard J. Fox spoke one word in Niagara County Court on Thursday, January 29, 2026. Judge John Ottaviano asked him how he pleaded to the murder of Crystal Curthoys, and Fox said, "Guilty." With that plea to a single count of second-degree murder, the sixty-two-year-old Buffalo man, already serving forty years to life for killing two other women, admitted a third killing.

Crystal Curthoys was thirty-two and had grown up in Lockport. She was killed in January 2023 in an apartment building on Orleans Avenue in Niagara Falls, the Niagara Gazette reported, a building where she and Fox had both lived. Law enforcement sources told the paper that Fox had lived in an apartment there and had worked as a handyman for a former owner of the property, and that he and Curthoys had known each other.

For more than two years no one found her. On March 28, 2025, acting on a tip, Niagara Falls detectives, working with Buffalo homicide detectives and investigators from the Chautauqua County Sheriff's Office, searched the building. Under the basement stairs, boarded up and closed in behind drywall, they found the badly decomposed remains of a woman wrapped in a tarp and plastic. At the time police would call Fox only a person of interest. The remains were later identified through dental records as Curthoys, and in December 2025 Fox was indicted in Niagara County for her murder.

According to the Gazette, Fox had told officers he would come to Niagara County Court only twice, once to plead guilty and once to be sentenced. Friends and relatives of his earlier victims sat in the courtroom as he kept the first of those promises, along with police from Niagara Falls, Buffalo and Chautauqua County.

"Although this defendant is already serving a life sentence, it was important to us to hold him accountable for this murder," Niagara County District Attorney Brian Seaman said after the plea. "Crystal was not just a number to be added to this defendant's tally sheet. She was a person with a family and a life. What she would have made of the life before her will now never be known."

Fox was arrested on January 7, 2025, while walking on Portage Road in Niagara Falls, in the killings of two women whose remains had been found off the Chautauqua Rails to Trails near Woleben Road, in the Town of Portland, more than three years earlier. A hiker found a skull there on September 26, 2021; the next day, digging at the same spot, investigators found the body of Marquita Mull, fifty, in a shallow grave. The skull and the skeletal remains with it were identified in December 2024 as Cassandra Watson. Erie County prosecutors said Fox killed Watson in Buffalo in about 2003 or 2004 and Mull in Buffalo in late June 2021, and that he had been in a relationship with Watson when she disappeared. No one had ever reported her missing. On September 19, 2025, Fox pleaded guilty to both murders as charged, with no reduced plea offered, and on November 20 Erie County Court Judge Suzanne Maxwell Barnes sentenced him to forty years to life.

Earlier in January, police in the Town of Brant said Fox had admitted to investigators that in 1976, when he was thirteen, he killed his grandmother, Beatrice Meabon, at her home. Investigators said no charges would be brought because of how long ago it happened.

Fox was due back before Judge Ottaviano on April 15, 2026, facing twenty-five years to life for the murder of Crystal Curthoys, to be added to the sentence he was already serving.

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